2024 Festival Teachers

Vanessa Poster was born and raised in Los Angeles. She received her BA and MA from Stanford University and worked with charitable organizations for more than 35 years, in fundraising and strategic planning.

Vanessa started writing in 1997 to help her cope with the depression brought on by infertility. She came back to writing after her divorce and again after the death of her second husband, Morgan Kramer. After Morgan’s death in 2015, she wrote and healed. Most of the poems in this volume had their inception during that first year. She gained much while writing through her grief process, inspiring her to develop a writing class for people dealing with grief and loss.

Vanessa is a member of the Los Angeles Poets and Writer’s Collective and The Poetry Salon. She has studied Method Writing with Jack Grapes for more than 25 years and has taught creative writing since 2017. In 2020, she expanded her teaching practice into an online writing salon reaching students from all over the world.

She married John Rubiner in 2020 with an international online audience of 250 screens, giving everyone a much-needed boost during some of the darkest days of the pandemic. With their common loss of a spouse to cancer, they share a determination to live fully, as we never know how many moments we will get.

Vanessa’s poems have appeared in Snapdragon: A Journal of Art & Healing, The Thieving Magpie, Fourth & Sycamore, ONTHEBUS, I’ll have Wednesday and Went to Ralphs to Get A Chicken. Her work is also included in a number of anthologies: Grief Dialogues The Book: Stories on Love and Loss; The Best of the Poetry Salon; and Stories from the Muses: How to Become a Better Writer. Her poem, Butterfly Bowls was recognized as a semi-finalist for the Jack Grapes Poetry Prize at Cultural Daily. This is her first collection of poetry.

She lives in Redondo Beach with her husband, John; his (now their) dog, Woody; and her 95-year-old father, David.